When I was thirty years old, a surgeon sat across from me and delivered news that no young man wants to hear. The degenerative disc disease in my lower back was not going to get better. It was likely, he told me with the particular bluntness that good surgeons sometimes deploy, to get worse. I should prepare myself for additional complications down the road.
I remember thinking — not for long, and not very deeply — that “down the road” was a long way off. I had a painting business to run, a family to support, and two back surgeries to recover from. I was young and strong, and I healed fast, faster than most. And then I went back to work.
That was nearly fifty years ago.
The Road He Warned Me About
I am now living in the future my surgeon described. The disc disease never left — it simply settled in, a permanent tenant I learned to manage rather than evict. Along the way, COPD joined the roster, a gift from three decades of tobacco and a painting trade where breathing protection wasn’t something anyone thought much about. Then came the hips — arthritis and bursitis, both — which have grown louder in recent years, limiting how far I walk and how well I sleep. Teeth. Other things I won’t bore you with.
I am not telling you this to catalog my complaints. I am telling you this because I suspect some of you are sitting with your own list right now — a diagnosis you just received, a body that is speaking to you in languages it didn’t use ten years ago — and you may be wondering what the years ahead look like.
I want to tell you what I know.
The disc disease never left — it simply settled in, a permanent tenant I learned to manage rather than evict.
What I Didn’t Do
I did not spend much time wondering what physical life would look like in my seventies. Not because I was in denial, but because dwelling on it would not have solved anything. There was a business to run, a family to raise, a life to live. The surgeon told me what might come. I filed it away and went back to work.
That instinct — to keep moving, to stay active, to refuse to let physical limitation become personal identity — has served me for five decades. It is not stubbornness for its own sake. It is a decision, made early and renewed quietly, about what kind of man I intended to be regardless of what my body was doing.
What I Have Learned
Here is what fifty years of living with chronic conditions has actually taught me, and none of it came from a prescription pad.
First: Gratitude is not a platitude. On a hard day — when the hips are talking and the back is weighing in — what gets me through is not willpower in the heroic sense. It is perspective. I have first-world problems. Manageable problems. I have access to remarkable medical care. There are no incoming missiles in my neighborhood. No infectious disease threatening my family. I can deal with what I have been given, and I am enormously grateful for my life and for the people in it. That is not a small thing. For many men, it is the whole thing.
Second: Your heroes are closer than you think. I have watched friends and family members go through genuine hell — treatment after treatment, year after year — cancer, serious illness, the kind of medical odyssey that would break most people. And they faced it with strength, dignity, and grace that still humbles me. Those are my heroes. Not because they suffered, but because of who they chose to be while they were suffering. That choice is available to all of us, in our own measure.
Third: The body is not the enemy. It is easy, when you are in pain or managing a chronic condition, to develop an adversarial relationship with your own physical self. I understand that impulse. But I have found it more useful to think of my body as a capable partner that has taken some damage over the years and requires more maintenance than it once did. That framing keeps me active, keeps me engaged, and keeps me from the kind of surrender that I think is far more dangerous than any diagnosis.
What the Research Confirms
None of this is just my experience talking. The research on men’s health in the second half of life is clear on a few points that align with what I have lived.
Men who remain physically active — even with significant limitations — consistently report better quality of life and slower functional decline than those who stop moving. Strength training, even begun late in life, builds bone density and protects against the falls that send too many men into assisted living before their time. And the psychological dimension of physical health is almost always underestimated: loneliness and social isolation, the research tells us, rival smoking as a health risk for older men.
The man who stays engaged — physically, socially, purposefully — is not just happier. He is measurably healthier.
I have found it more useful to think of my body as a capable partner that has taken some damage over the years and requires more maintenance than it once did.
A Word to the Man Who Just Got the News
If you are reading this because you have recently heard something from a doctor that frightened you — a diagnosis, a prognosis, a cautionary word about what may lie ahead — I want to speak directly to you.
You are allowed to be sobered by it. I was. But do not let the sobering become the story.
The surgeon who told me at thirty that complications were coming was right. He was also not wrong about the other thing — the thing he didn’t say explicitly but that I somehow understood anyway: that how I carried it was going to matter more than the diagnosis itself.
Fifty years later, I am still standing. Still working. Still grateful. Still moving forward.
That is available to you too.
